Passato

Passato is the Italian term for “past” and is used in grammar to refer to the past tense forms of the verb. It designates actions or states that occurred before the present. The term encompasses several tenses, among them the commonly used passato prossimo, imperfetto, and passato remoto, as well as the compound forms trapassato prossimo and trapassato remoto.

The passato prossimo is a compound tense formed with the present tense of an auxiliary (avere or essere) plus the past participle of the main verb. It expresses completed actions with relevance to the present or recent past events, and it is by far the most frequent past tense in spoken Italian. The imperfetto is a simple past form used for ongoing past actions, habitual actions, background descriptions, and states without a defined endpoint.

The passato remoto is a literary or formal past tense used mainly in historical, narrative, or elevated prose to describe events in the distant past. It is less common in everyday speech and varies by region. The trapassato prossimo, also a compound tense, uses imperfect of avere or essere plus the past participle and indicates an action that occurred before another past action. The trapassato remoto, rarely used in contemporary speech, serves a similar function in literature, describing an action anterior to the passato remoto.

Auxiliary selection follows general rules: avere is used with most verbs, while essere is used with intransitive verbs of movement or change of state, and with certain pronominal verbs. When essere is the auxiliary, the past participle must agree in gender and number with the subject.

Etymology traces passato to Latin passatus, the past participle of passare, meaning “to pass.”